If writing...is a form of drag for Chee, it is also an act of mystic invocation and transference ... Chee leavens his heaviest topics...with charming episodes like his stint as a waiter at William and Pat Buckley’s Park Avenue maisonette, a job that prompted a crisis of conscience given Buckley’s infamous proposal to brand AIDS patients on their wrists and buttocks ... Other essays have the kind of grandiose titles you’d expect from a more traditional book on craft ... Yet even at his most mystical, Chee is generous; these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity. Chee is refreshingly open about his sometimes liberating, sometimes claustrophobic sense of exceptionality ... Throughout, Chee endeavors to catch himself at a distance and reckon, ever humble and bracingly honest, with the slippery terrain of memory, identity and love ... Chee has written a moving and personal tribute to impermanence, a wise and transgressive meditation on a life lived both because of and in spite of America, a place where, he writes, 'you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.'
How good is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel? It’s so good that I could fill my word count just with quotations ... Edinburgh was a masterpiece; so too is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. One of its beauties is how simultaneously shaped and flexible it is, both thematically coherent and varied in subject matter ... Chee’s particular style of mind and habits of moral engagement hold the collection together; every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigor, tact ... The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and it uncovers. That’s the gift that writing has given Chee, and it’s the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers.
As Chee’s gaze turns inwards, he beckons readers to experience his private moments with such clarity and honesty that we’re immediately brought into his consciousness. At the same time, he asks us to contemplate the largest questions about identity, sexuality, family, art and war ... Though some of these beautiful pieces have been published before, collected together, they build to reveal the journey of a writer ... By the end of this moving collection, we learn through Chee’s experiences that to be a writer is to continuously reconsider the self, to find what drives you even in moments of despair.
In place of the imperative structure characteristic of so many craft books that cheerfully promise a way forward, that evince a comfortable universe of coherent rules and achievable outcomes, Chee offers instead the roundabout and the recursive, the indirect and stubbornly nonlinear. His essays are an invitation not to review the rules of writing, but to trace a unique pathway into knowledge and being in and through writing ... Pages and pages into the project [Edinburgh], Chee begins to find his way, and ultimately, begins to understand the relationship between plot, action, and his own life. 'I had written my way there,' Chee marvels, realizing that letting the story unfold was the writing. And this is the beauty modeled by Chee’s book: the act of writing takes the writer to the self.
Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic ... In his new book, he circles back from his last book, the epic Queen of the Night, to further mine his inner core with a refreshing candor that poses answerless questions and owns misjudgment and uncertainty ... Chee is a very special artist; his writing is lyrical and accessible, whimsical and sad, often all at the same time. No doubt he is an inspiring writing teacher as well.
That Chee is the person to illuminate his truth is a gift. As an artist exploring his craft, he explores the technical, but he also does not shy away from asking the questions that haunt anyone who dreams of leaving their mark on the world: Can I write, should I write, who will I be if I don’t write? What’s worth writing about? ... Like the best writers’ memoirs, How To Write an Autobiographical Novel is more of a show-by-example than a how-to, but it’s a wonderful guide nonetheless. That Chee has spent so much of his life writing and teaching and nurturing new talent comes through on every page of this book.
Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel doesn’t hand us any easy instructions ... The book is a constellation of Mr. Chee’s many selves, and its most satisfying moments can be found at their intersections. What makes this 280 page self-portrait so complex and whole is that these identities never stand alone, nor do they clash or compete. Instead, they brush up against each other like passengers on a crowded bus ... As a narrator, Alexander Chee is incisive but capacious. Identities aren’t static, and he never treats them as such. Some of his most searing insights are about moments of becoming.
His new How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is one of those rare books that a reader can open up, flip to a page, and pull out sentences that will leave them astounded ... yes, each essay stands alone, but they also hum together, ebbing and flowing back and forth through Chee’s life as a writer, a queer man, a Korean American, a teacher, a waiter, a New Yorker, and a child of Maine ... Chee has this wonderful outsider’s self-awareness. He is a flaneur with a conscience who has a habit of joining the party ... It’s worthy of a spot among other classics of the craft, including Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Stephen King’s On Writing, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Its beauty, honesty, and Yankee-esque practicality are treasures.
Chee’s advice for the writer spans the pragmatic and the lyrical ... I might have been a better fiction writer had I read Chee’s essays. I might have gained a more sophisticated understanding of how writing fiction emerges from the self yet, of necessity–and if it is to interest anyone beside yourself–take you outside yourself as well.
...a book that will leave you breathless, as much for its vulnerability as for its exquisite sentences ... there’s a certain ambivalence in the catharsis Chee finds in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel...And Chee is willing to immerse himself in this ambivalence, to explore fully how writing his autobiographical novel both wounded him and healed him.
...Chee is a watcher, an observer constantly on the outside looking in and developing an acute sensitivity that has enabled him to craft an earnest and moving essay collection about the relationship of art to one’s life and how they bleed into and influence one another ... the effect of reading Chee’s essays is to be reminded of why we write, but also, why we read, even in these times of never ending distress. You don’t know who you can affect, who will connect with your work, who you can urge to keep going despite whatever trauma or grief or pain. To read this book is to be reminded that this is what the best of literature can do. It is such a gift, and I am grateful.
...[a] gorgeous, dense, provocative book ... The effect is both profound and incremental, of stories that stand alone and work together to unveil a life ... The book is operatic in its range, reflecting the author’s life as an outsider not only to the culture, but at times, to his family and himself. The resulting narrative makes for some powerful, lyrical prose.
...as the book goes on, readers grow along with Chee. We watch his transformation from a quiet, self-doubting young man into a more confident, self-assured writer. Chee leaves himself remarkably exposed in these pieces, and his prose is illustrative and disciplined ... His essays are full of wisdom and insight, as if he’s always teaching how to write, even when not saying this expressly. While he never becomes pedantic, his one deficiency is that, at times, he tends to leave behind the practical and cross into the mystical, especially when discussing the novel ... a formative collection, sure to cement Chee as not only a preeminent novelist but a powerful essayist as well.
...the book is a well-orchestrated chronicle of a life well-lived ... Chee’s realizations read as personal, yet universally contextualized ... In chronicling his personal and creative struggles, Chee produces a cathartic primer for treading through the challenges of life with the same grace he displays as a writer.
The book is incredibly generous, exploring Chee’s coming of age as a writer and gay Korean-American, from his childhood in Maine, to his activist days in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS crisis, and his time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He writes about the apartments he has lived and written in, the gardens he’s grown, the mistakes he made while writing his first novel, and the things he’s learned in the years since ... The essay The Autobiography of My Novel takes us on his journey from confusing autobiographical writing with laziness, to realizing it how difficult and dangerous it can be ... Chee’s talent for these kinds of cyclical fragments and tautologies is matched only by his brilliant analogies.
His 16 essays are an MFA, a bildungsroman, a compendium of wisdom that ricochets off the page into (you hope) your own spirit, because you could wish for nothing more than to write in Chee’s exquisite, metronomically-measured prose, to reproduce the clarity of his voice, a voice so necessary to people of colour, to mixed-race, queer individuals living at the interstices of identity in a world that doesn’t know what to do with us (besides subjecting us to violence). He is a beacon.
...[a] stunning essay collection ... These words I am writing are in praise. These words I am writing are in review. These words are none of that and more than that. They are a writing with Alexander Chee, a writing with the thoughts and feelings this book invites. A writing with this book which is one that, for me, allows for the expression of the universal through the particular.
...bears all the hallmarks of the writer's intelligence, curiosity and precision with language ... As much as Chee's essays exhume the autobiographical details of his life, collectively they're concerned with something greater than autobiography--the struggle and triumph of the novel ... Entertaining and illuminating, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel will serve writing students and teachers well. Not a straightforward handbook on craft, its lessons nonetheless excite and inspire creative thinking. In equal measure, the collection's humanity and grace will tug the heartstrings of the general reader.
Though Chee, who now teaches at Dartmouth, in a very welcome way makes students of readers, his audience is in no way limited to writers. His quotable, pristine essays consider Chee’s family’s struggles, his AIDS activism and related losses, his tarot obsession, the labor of writing, the legacies of trauma, and the essentiality of making and having art. Hand to readers searching for something to follow 2017’s incredible parade of writers’ memoirs.
Chee offers a hybrid vision, one that surpasses simple personal revelation or practical instruction. Illuminating the winding path through a writer’s inner world, he never hides his own setbacks and self-sabotaging meanders. The wisdom that emerges from these essays always feels grounded by rigorous introspection and purposeful self-exposure, and this perspective eradicates any trace of the self-aggrandizement that can easily infect personal writing.
What truly unifies these pieces is the author’s consistent care with words and open-hearted tone; having been through emotional and artistic wars, he’s produced a guidebook to help others survive them too. Deserving of a place among other modern classic writers’ memoirs like Stephen King’s On Writing and Chee’s mentor Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.
A duller, less evocative title along the lines of How I Became a Writer might have been more accurate, but that would have failed to convey Chee’s marvelously oblique style as an essayist—his capacity to inform and educate readers while they’re too enraptured to notice.
